Chiefs (27 page)

Now, from far down the Raleigh road toward Delano, a column of dust arose, led by a small dot of a car. Soon it was visible as a police car, and it eventually turned into Patricia’s newly paved driveway and pulled up before the house. Sonny Butts and Charley Ward got out.

“Afternoon, Colonel,” Sonny sang out. A lot of people referred to Billy as colonel, and only partly because of his military rank. In Georgia, as in much of the South, attorneys were called that. Billy had never known why.

“Sonny, how are you?” He got up and shook hands with both officers. He had seen little of Sonny since their return from the war, only an occasional glimpse of him patrolling on the motorcycle or directing traffic.

“Just fine, Colonel. That’s going to be some house.” Sonny looked admiringly toward the structure.

“Yes, well, my wife never seems to do anything small. What can I do for you?”

Sonny handed him an envelope. “Got some good news for you. Fellow just showed up at the station with a brand new Chevrolet for you. Said he couldn’t find you at your office or the trailer park, so he reckoned it’d be all right to leave it with us. Here’s the papers and keys. We put him on the bus back to Atlanta.”

“Oh, that’s great.” He took the papers. “Fellow I was in the service with has a dealership in Atlanta.” Billy had sent him a large deposit a month before and agreed to take whatever he could get. “I appreciate your keeping the car for me and coming all the way out here.”

“Glad to do it. Anyway”—Sonny nodded toward Billy’s ‘38 Ford—“I wondered if you’d be interested in selling the convertible. I been looking for one.”

“Sure, come have a look at it.” They walked toward the car. “Wasn’t much when I got it, but I’ve put some money into it—a ring job and some rewiring and four recaps. It’s in good shape now, except for a little rust here and there. Spare’s not so hot, but it’s okay for a spare.”

Sonny walked around the car, kicked the tires, asked some questions, listened to the engine. They haggled, agreed on a price. Sonny wrote a check. Patricia came down the temporary front steps and was introduced to the two policemen.

“Sonny’s just bought himself a snazzy Ford convertible,” Billy said to her.

“How much are you paying him to take it away?”

Billy looked pained. “He got it for a song. The two of them sandbagged me.”

“I’ll miss it, Officer Butts. You take good care of it. Billy’ll never buy anything that romantic again.”

“Don’t you worry, Miz Lee. I’m going to fix it up even better.” He turned to Billy. “Who did the engine job for you? Mickey Shelton?”

“No, it was Marshall Parker, the colored fellow who opened up over by Braytown. Did a good job, too. I recommend him. He’s a lot cheaper than Micky.”

Sonny shook his head. “Well, I never knew a nigger could fix any kind of machinery more’n a wheelbarrow. I hope you’re right about him, seeing as how I’ve bought the thing.”

Billy looked at the ground. “Marshall’s good. He was pretty good in the army, too, from what I hear. He picked up a bronze star at Anzio.” Billy wanted to change the subject. “I hear you were in the Bulge.”

‘ “Yeah.”

“Pretty rough, I guess.”

“Only for those guys who couldn’t take it. I didn’t have no problem. We got along without Eleanor’s Niggers.”

Billy could feel his anger rising. “Hope you like the car, Sonny. Stop by the office tomorrow, and I’ll give you the registration.”

“Sure thing, Colonel.” Sonny got into the Ford and drove away, followed closely by Charley Ward in the police car.

“Funny,” said Patricia. “He never even noticed you were annoyed about the way he talked about Marshall Parker.”

“Yes, he did,” Billy said, looking down the road after Sonny. “He was putting the needle in. I knew guys like him in the army.

They liked to see just how far they could go with you. He noticed. “

Sonny turned off the Raleigh road onto Highway 41 and drove the two miles to Delano at seventy-five miles an hour. He took his hands off the wheel for a moment and noticed that it vibrated slightly at that speed. At sixty it was solid as a rock. Shit, he’d have gone another two hundred for the car if Billy Lee had pushed him. Stupid bastard.

As he approached the city limits he saw a sign he hadn’t noticed before: “Parker’s Garage—repairs on all makes & models.” Billy Lee had said the nigger was a lot cheaper than Mickey Shelton. Sonny whipped into the bare dirt space before the converted barn and killed the engine. He could see a pair of feet sticking out from under an old Plymouth. He got out of the car and walked inside.

“Be with you in just a minute.” The voice came from under the car. Sonny waited impatiently for a moment, then tapped the sole of one of the protruding shoes with his foot.

“Come on, I ain’t got all day.”

“I’ll be with you just as soon as I tighten this bolt.” There was an edge in the voice. Sonny didn’t like that from a nigger. After another moment’s wait Marshall pushed himself from under the car, riding on a slab of plywood mounted on casters. He stood up, wiping his hands with a rag. “What can I do for you?”

Sonny glared at him for a second before speaking. “You know how to balance wheels?”

Marshall waited a beat before replying evenly, “Sure do.”

“Well, I got a little shimmy in the front end at about seventy-five. I figure it’s a balancing job.”

Marshall looked at the convertible. “You buy Colonel Lee’s car, did you?”

“Well, I sure as hell didn’t steal it.”

“I balanced the wheels on it last week. You might have a little alignment problem, though.”

“Listen, I’m due back at the station, I haven’t got time to argue with you about it. Just get the front wheels off and balance them right this time.”

“I balanced them right the first time. Them’s recaps on there. They won’t never run as true as new tires. But if you want to bring it back in the morning I’ll check the front end alignment. I’m gon’ be tied up ‘til this evening on this job.”

Sonny flushed. “Whose rattletrap is that, anyway?”

“Smitty’s.” Smitty ran the grocery store in Braytown.

“Well, you just call up Smitty and tell him you gotta work on Police Officer Butts’s car.
He
can come back tomorrow.”

“I don’t have no phone yet—they bringin’ it next week—and, anyway, Smitty’s mama is sick up in Atlanta, and he’s got to go up there tonight and carry her home. Now, it ain’t gonna hurt it to drive it tonight the way it is, and if you bring it back in the morning I’ll do the best job I can on it. Tell you what, I’ll pick it up at the police station and fix it and have it back to you by dinner time if it ain’t nothing serious and I don’t have to order no parts.” Marshall knew Sonny was getting mad, and he didn’t want any problems with a uniformed policeman who was also carrying a gun, so he said all this as placatingly as he could manage, considering that he was getting pretty mad himself.

“You know,” said Sonny, “I thought I’d see what kind of work you do and maybe let you do all my servicing for me, but I shoulda known better. I reckon I just better take my car on over to Mickey Shelton where I know it’ll get done right.” He turned and started for the car.

Now Marshall had to make a real effort to hold himself in. “Well, I ‘predate you coming to me, and I wish I could fix it right now, but I promised this man his car. I done all the work on that convertible, you know, and couldn’t nobody do it no better, I reckon.”

Sonny got to the car and opened the door. He turned back toward Marshall. “Shit. You’ll be back to sweeping floors and fixing inner tubes for Mickey Shelton in a month, anyway. I don’t know why I even thought I could do business with a nigger.” He slammed the door, started the car, reversed into the road, and burned rubber driving away.

Marshall stood in the door of his garage, his jaw clamped tightly shut, looking after the angry policeman. Annie, his wife, came out of the little office cubicle at the back, where she had been working on the books.

“You shouldn’ta made that man mad, Marshall. You know what we been hearing ‘bout him. He can make us a lot of trouble.”

“Shoot, girl, I was just as polite as I could be to that white boy. You heard every word of it.”

“You know how to talk right to white folks. You coulda been talking to a colored man the way you was talking to him.”

“Listen, I’m a businessman now. I don’t have to go Uncle Tommin’ nobody no more. He can’t do nothing to us. Don’t you worry about it.” He knew she would worry, anyway.

Sonny was still angry when he got back to the station. He’d fix that nigger. He’d get him in his jail some Saturday night, and he’d fix him.

Chapter 7.

ON AN EVENING in early August two meetings were held in Delano. Their purposes were disparate.

In an apartment over the garage of Dr. Frank Mudter, his son, Dr. Tom Mudter, hosted a group which included Billy Lee, Bob Blankenship, the new owner-editor of the
Delano Messenger;
Ellis Woodall, owner of a radio shop; and Brooks Peters, the new Baptist minister. They were all young and all veterans, with the single exception of Peters, who had been too underweight to pass his physical.

This was not their first meeting. Since returning from the war they had been laying plans to establish their generation politically in Delano and the Tri-Counties. For more than four years virtually every healthy adult male between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five had been absent from the community, and the natural progression of the young into positions of influence had been halted. Now, at the approach of the first state-wide election since the end of the war, they were working hard to make up for the lost years. Their efforts were not without resistance from an establishment that had hardened in their absence.

Among their group and among the candidates they supported, only Billy Lee seemed reasonably sure of election, and that had made him their unofficial leader. Now he called them to order. “Okay, gents, let’s hear what’s going on out there.”

Bob Blankenship spoke up. “Why don’t you start by telling us where you think the state-senate race stands?”

“Well, Mr. Holmes seems to think we’re okay. Ward is a nice enough fellow, but he’s not well known outside of Talbot County, and he was a 4-F, that’s not helping him any. He could edge us out in Talbot, but we think we’ll take Harris and Meriwether without too much trouble. God knows I’ve shaken hands with every man, woman, and mule in the Tri-Counties at least twice. Lucky we don’t have any Republicans to worry about; the primary is tough enough without having to fight it all over again in a general election. Bob, you’re about as objective an ear as we’ll get. How’re we doing in the other races?”

Blankenship, a short, heavy man in his early forties, had bought the newspaper from Harmon Everson some six months before, and had quickly settled into the town. “The way I see it, we’ll get one seat on the city council pretty sure; maybe the second one, too, if we work hard. I think Tom is in better shape than Ellis right now, because everybody knows his daddy. I think we’d be safe in putting more of our effort behind Ellis in the five weeks we’ve got left. We ought to make a real effort with the American Legion boys. They could turn it for us.”

“That’s okay with me,” said Tom.

“What about the sheriff’s race?” James Montgomery, a veteran from Greenville, the county seat, was challenging Skeeter Willis.

Bob Blankenship spoke again. “A toss-up, I reckon. James has got the veteran vote for sure, but Skeeter’s got a lot of friends in this county.”

“A lot of enemies, too, I’d think,” said Billy. “A lot of people suspect he’s in the bootleggers’ pocket, and everybody knows about the black-market stuff during the war.”

Tom Mudter chipped in. “Yeah, and a lot of people were buying stuff from him, too, stuff they couldn’t get anywhere else. They might be grateful to him.”

Blankenship looked thoughtful. “You know, I haven’t really written a lot about what went on during the war. Maybe a good, strong editorial on the black market—no names, mind you— might stir up enough guilt in some folks to sway their votes toward veterans.”

Brooks Peters spoke for the first time. “Speaking as one acquainted with folks’ guilt over their sins, I think that just might work. In fact, it might be worth a whole series of editorials. A little repentance at the polls could go a long way next month. By the way, the last Sunday before the primary, I plan to lean pretty heavily on our debt of gratitude to our veterans in my sermon. Having been a 4-F myself I don’t think it’ll look too self-serving.” Peters felt keenly his guilt at not having been in uniform.

Billy spoke again. “Brooks, I think that’s a good idea, but you’ve got to be careful. You’re the first preacher the First Baptist Church has ever had under the age of forty, and I can tell you that in the deacons meetings, when we were deciding whether to call you, there was a lot of harrumphing going on among some of the old boys. You can go just so far with them, and they’ll be on your neck like a dog on a coon.”

“Billy, I made my decision about that when I accepted the church’s call. I decided I was going to do the job the way I felt it ought to be done and then take the consequences. I told the board of deacons that, too, you may recall. You were there. Now, I think I established to their satisfaction that we don’t have any theological differences, but I told them then that I expected to conduct the day-to-day affairs of the church without undue interference—gladly hearing advice, but reserving my decision on whether to take it—and that I would preach my sermons according to my conscience and my perceptions of what the congregation’s needs were.” He tilted his chair back and grinned. “Right now I perceive that the congregation needs some veterans helping to run things in this town and this county, and I’m going to tell them so.”